Chaos Group Begins V-Ray 3.0 for Maya Beta

SOFIA, BULGARIA – The core functionality that has made V-Ray popular for film, commercial and episodic television work is being upgraded with a beta release of Chaos Group’s V-Ray 3.0 for Maya.

Included in the initial round of enhancements will be a new Progressive Rendering Engine, support for several open source technologies, and up to 5x faster ray tracing and rendering performance.

After years of using V-Ray in production on projects like “Oblivion” and “Iron Man 3,” Digital Domain has used an early integration of deep image support to put some of 3.0’s features to the test. “On ‘Ender’s Game,’ we hooked massive Houdini swarm simulations up to V-Ray Proxies and rendered the most geometry we’ve ever attempted at Digital Domain,” said Linghao Li, Technical Director at Digital Domain. “In one shot alone there were 333,443 ships on screen. 27 billion polygons rendered out for Deep Compositing and V-Ray handled it no problem.”

V-Ray 3.0 introduces a new path-tracing engine (Progressive Image Sampler) that provides artists with instant feedback during the look development process. In addition, V-Ray 3.0's new optimized core raises speed levels dramatically in all physically based lighting, shading and rendering.

For character and creature development, V-Ray 3.0 offers up to 15x faster hair rendering, improved Ray-Traced Subsurface Scattering (SSS), and a new VRaySkinMtl with built-in SSS and layered reflections. Support for MARI’s UDIM and Autodesk Mudbox’s UVTILE formats makes it easier for users to incorporate textures from their favorite programs.

Already known for easy integration with production pipelines, V-Ray 3.0 has become even more versatile by adding support for common open source formats like OpenSubdiv, Alembic 1.5, Deep Images and OpenEXR 2.0, OpenColorIO, and in the near future, programmable shaders with Open Shading Language [OSL].

All V-Ray users participating in the beta can send in their thoughts on what would make for the best final product.